RESEARCH

Summary

My work broadly covers the cultural, social, and policy implications of emerging technologies, primarily social media. I am interested in how social media makes large audiences available to individuals, and how these audiences affect identity, self-presentation, and interpersonal relationships. Currently, I am researching disinformation and far-right subcultures online and conducting fieldwork for my second monograph (on networked privacy and marginalized populations).

I am a qualitative social scientist located primarily in the subfield of Internet Studies, with my main discipline being Communication and Media Studies. My methods include ethnography, interviews, focus groups, discourse analysis, and cultural studies. I like multimethodological work and enjoy working with critical, interpretive, qualitative, and quantitative scholars.

I am interested in far-right extremist subcultures, primarily the alt-right and the Men’s Rights Movement, and how they use social media to spread propaganda, manipulate mainstream media, and conduct systemic harassment. Given that most social media technologies were based on idealistic visions of human interaction, they are easily exploited by bad actors. Institutions like journalism and academia have been slow to adapt, and their adherence to practices developed in the age of broadcast media has, for the most part, allowed them to be exploited very efficiently and ruthlessly by extremist groups. For instance, the emphasis on “free speech” on platforms like Reddit and Twitter has made them rife with hateful speech and harassment, while the mainstream media’s desire to show “both sides of the story” has allowed white supremacist and misogynist points of view to be positioned as equally valid as anti-racist and feminist perspectives.

My most recent work examines why people share fake news. I maintain that people primarily share news stories online to express their identity. In a very polarizing time in America, partisan identity often reflects social class, family, and environment. In other words, the political is personal. As a result, solving the “fake news” problem is not simply a matter of media literacy or fact-checking; it requires delving into the conspiratorial thinking and hatred of opposition parties that is spreading across both the left and the right.

​My motivation in researching online privacy is to interrogate victim-blaming discourses that maintain that privacy violations are the fault of the victim, whether for putting “too much” information online or not protecting themselves appropriately. In contrast, I have been working out a theory of networked privacy that maintains that privacy violations are inevitable as a result of the social connections made possible by social media, the technical affordances of platforms, and large-scale data-mining and surveillance. These violations are inevitably most difficult for people marginalized in other areas of their lives, meaning that privacy should be seen as a social justice issue. My focus so far in this area has been socio-economic status, although my current research discusses gendered privacy which examines “revenge porn,” harassment, doxing, and nude photo leaks as privacy issues that are more likely to happen to women, nonbinary, trans, and queer folks.

Other recent work interrogates the privacy paradox, which basically asks why people claim to care about their privacy while posting personal data online. I find this line of questioning quite frustrating. Information provision online is not and should not be a proxy of privacy concern. This ignores the vast social benefits that participating online provides, and it ignores the fact that people delineate between information like health data, credit card numbers, nude photos etc. and social information (pictures, birthday, likes and dislikes). I am also interested in the privacy calculus literature, which maintains that people make a cost-benefit decision when providing information. My two papers with Eszter Hargittai suggests that people think privacy violations are inevitable, and instead do what they can to mitigate their impact.​